Re: Weird Arch issues

vallor wrote this post and blinked twice:

On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:07:58 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>
wrote in <vdm4ve$3nuv0$3@dont-email.me>:
>

So all was basically hunky-dory on this old ASUS laptop (apart from the
login issue; I have to go to a virtual console, login there, and run
startx).
 
Looking at the rat's nest of cables in the "office", I powered
everything down... the router, the interface to AT&T fiber, the MIDI
devices, the laptop....
 
After the cleanup (much nicer), I powered up and logged in. Then came a
couple of weird issues, and I am not sure why.
 
1. YouTube took forever to open a video, and would not play. I
reinstalled,
   renamed the Chromium and Firefox configuration directories, and
   eventually got them to play. But no sound from YouTube (which would
   play audio out the laptop speakers.  MPD played fine (through the
   Behringer USB audio box). Using yt-dlp to download a video from
   YouTube worked fine, fast as ever.
 
   On the Lenovo laptop, no problem. Still at a loss, nothing I've tried
   works. I disabled all Chrome extensions (Dark Reader and Vimium),
   nada.
 
2. I wanted to rearrange my music directory and copy it to a USB drive.
   At about 28Gb, it should have taken around 5 minutes to copy.
   Instead, it took hours. Not sure if it's a VM issue. Today I copied
   the music to my Android phone, and it took around 5 minutes.
 
At times during the copy from the cheapo SSD to the USB, the system
would undergo long pauses.
 
The output of "sysctl -a | grep dirty":
 
    vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10
    vm.dirty_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000 (5 minutes)
    vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500
    vm.dirtytime_expire_seconds = 43200 (!!)
 
The setting maintain on the Lenovo.
 
Sigh.

>
Does dmesg -T show anything while trying to play back video?  I've
had a machine throw PCiE retries before, causing unusual behavior
with various peripherals.  Does it have a discrete GPU?  Maybe it
bumped loose.

Doesn't show anything that could be related.

Also, run free(1) and make sure you didn't lose memory.  Perhaps you
bumped the laptop and had memory unseat.

Nah, I moved the rolling desk with the laptop on it, but no bumps.

Certainly sounds like hardware.

There's some hanky-panky going on.

I can download a video and it plays fine in VLC (but not in mplayer or
smplayer). (I'm watching a podcast with Larry Fast that I downloaded right
now).

Had a weird issue where booting wouldn't work; powering off and restarting
was fine then.

I just rebuilt a small project using g++ (and meson). No problem.
Then I rebuilt it with clang, and got an ERROR: Compiler clang cannot
compile programs.

Reinstalled clang, and then the build worked.

I'm wondering if my $28 512Gb SSD is a piece of crap.

--
You're being followed.  Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days.